The Power of Repetition

As a long time teacher trainer and having had the honor to go into many classrooms – the one thing I see missing in most language programs is “repetition” or as we gently term it, “recycling” of content.

We all know intuitively that to learn a language, we have to use a word, encounter a word in different contexts, many times. (research suggests maybe more than 20 times!). Only then will it “plant” and grow and be part of us. We can’t just memorize but have to get the words, the phrases, the structures into our long term memory. The only good way is to repeat things.

But repetition itself isn’t the answer. It is “how” you do it. You have to time and space it out. It can’t be done too soon nor too late. Language learners won’t benefit as much “repeating” a word the same day, as they will the next. Even better, the next week. This is also a feature of our quiz system and the repetition in different contexts and on different days, is hardwired into the quiz.

On EnglishCentral, the videos you practice are put on your My English page. You can build up your library. But what good is that? Well, you can then go back, a week, 2 weeks later and do the same video and quizzes. This will dramatically help you retain and move the learning from short term to long term memory. Go to your My English page and repeat some videos – it will really help!

Also, we’ll even be making this easier! Shortly, you’ll be able to favorite a video right on the video page. Just click the star. Stay tuned for this…..

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Comments

Nice!
And what if instead of just to favorite a video, we have a feature to ‘remember to repeat in X days’, so it would send us an email or just appear in a different box on our home page when it’s past the X days?
Anyway, I’ll start to repeat =p

Great idea! Soon, we will be updating Teacher Tools and one thing added will be notifying students about meeting teacher set goals. But would also be good to do something along the lines of what you mentioned – we are building a set of notification settings and your idea will be considered for sure.